San Francisco and wage disparity

There’s been a lot of attention in San Francisco about wage disparity, ever-increasing rents and housing values1, and the attitudes about them.  It’s very easy to see it play out in person if you live here.

From the sidelines, you can see it in the press.  Take two pieces from the San Francisco Chronicle, written just a few days apart:

‘Techie’ term draws derision from tech workers, in which tech workers2 complain about being called “techie” by non-tech workers, and non-tech workers complain about the behavior of tech workers.  (This article has an amazing example of the blinders that tech workers can have about their position here, where one self-identified entrepreneur said, “Whenever you get a mass migration of a new wave of people, you get a negative connotation from the people who were there before – like Mexicans in the Mission. The new wave always gets a bad rap.”  I really can’t accept that highly-paid tech workers can be reasonably compared to mostly low-wage manual laborers.

Protesters block Google bus in S.F. Mission, in which local advocates protest the use of public bus stops by private buses shuttling employees from San Francisco to Silicon Valley tech companies.  The latter incident has spurred much discussion amongst tech bloggers.  There have been some pretty reprehensible posts written about it.  It was hard to choose the worst of the lot until a poorly-written piece on Pando labeled as satire came along.

Jason Calacanis has written an excellent response to this, in which he points out that “[a] society can best be judged by how the most privileged regard and treat the most vulnerable and weak”.  I agree: I think it’s incumbent on those of us who have been lucky enough and privileged enough to have our skills valued so highly consider how we can make our communities better places for all of us, not just those who can afford an ever-increasing cost-of-living.

  1. Which is generally good if you’re already a homeowner, but much less so if you’re an aspiring homeowner.
  2. Yes, you can see my bias here